• 10 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Just to be clear: if someone has actively shown growth then I am all for them moving past shit (obviously the amount of growth required depends on the level of shitty before but). James Gunn being kind of the poster child for that where he was an edgelord dipshit when he was younger. But every time that comes up, almost everyone around him makes it clear that he has grown significantly and he owns up to it every time.

    Like… look at idubbz. I, and many others, aren’t sure if we can ever actually “forgive” him considering how much abuse we received because of people directly quoting his hate. But he also (at least briefly. Not sure what he has done since) made it a big point of actually APOLOGIZING. And… getting a lot of shit and hatred from other youtubers who refuse to apologize for their shittiness for whatever reason (shoutout to moistcritical for breaking his apolitical stance to aggressively insist Ian didn’t need to apologize for slurs and bigotry…).

    Contrast that with “he said the N word a lot a few years back but hasn’t done it recently” with no indication beyond that.





  • If you are capable of setting up your own personal VPN, you don’t need Tailscale. You still may want to use it though, depending on how much of a novelty Network Fun is for you in your spare time.

    For me, the main advantage to Tailscale et al is that it is on a per device basis. So I can access my SMB shares or Frigate setup remotely while still keeping the rest of my internal network isolated( to the degree I trust the software and network setup). You CAN accomplish that with some fancy firewall rules and vlanning but… yeah.


  • Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

    For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

    1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
    2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
    3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

    My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).


    To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.



  • Quick google puts Canola Oil’s smoke point at 450-ish Fahrenheit. You can do the real good stir frying with that. Even the “get a pan ridiculously hot to sear some meat” is in the 300s and MAYBE capping around 500 which isn’t great with canola but is still doable since the food will lower the pan temperature pretty quick anyway.

    So if your pan is getting that hot then you are doing it wrong or are specifically trying to do restaraunt style sous vide and don’t realize they use (char)broilers for that.


  • A soft (e.g. silicone) spatula is all you really need to avoid damaging a non-stick pan. And they are incredibly useful for other uses (a rubber flipper is awesome if you are perpetually impatient when it comes to flipping meat and don’t want to damage the skin).

    But yeah. They are inherently a consumable which is why nobody should ever spend more than 20-ish (pre-trump) USD on one. It is up to an individual to decide if they would use it enough to justify that.



  • For the majority of cooking? Yes, you don’t need a non-stick pan. A properly used steel (or even aluminum) pan will work. Cast Iron is obviously loved but Carbon Steel is actually what most people want and has almost all of the same properties. But properly oiling your pan (and I actually love cooking sprays for dishes where I am using a neutral oil. Glug of “real” oil, get it up to temp, and then give a quick spritz just to make sure EVERYTHING is coated) and cooking at a high enough heat that your proteins can properly react and not “stick” to the pan will get you almost the entire way.

    That said? Eggs and fish. Eggs very much are in that “nobody ever complained about too much butter” category but there is a lot to be said about a quick egg without any additional fats. And if you are cooking eggs these days, you can afford a 20 dollar specialty pan… And fish in particular is the kind of food where it is very easy to overcook it while waiting for all the appropriate reactions to occur so you can cleanly flip it.

    If I were to downsize my kitchen (which I hopefully will be doing in a few months…)? That shit goes in the appropriate bin. But if you have the space? A 20-ish dollar restaurant supply store non-stick pan is AMAZING. And cheap enough that you can afford to get rid of it the moment you see any scratching.



  • This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

    If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

    A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.


    That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.



  • It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

    Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

    THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

    And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…



  • Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

    Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

    Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.



  • I want to agree with Beart but…

    SAG et al have already more or less abandoned voice actors. In the very near future it won’t matter if actors agree to work for these companies because they won’t NEED those actors. They’ll have training data or they’ll pay randos off the street to generate some training data that they then heavily tweak to sound like Ashley Burch and so forth.

    And before people pretend that consumers won’t stand for that: Anyone with any knowledge of scene composition or lighting clowns on Netflix et al near constnatly. Guess what the super popular movies that everyone watches are? Because, yeah, there will still be works of art like a Blade Runner or even an Anora (the plot was shite but the cinematography was peak). They’ll pale in comparison to people pretending they aren’t going to watch Happy Gilmore 2.

    And same with VA. People will claim they are opposed and it is horrible and complete trash compared to a human… and they’ll still buy the games until having “human” voice acting is the exception and only for “arthouse” games.


  • You’ve kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:

    There are two big uses for an “offline” media library.

    Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but…). You don’t really care about quality and just want to consume media.

    Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don’t need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.

    That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a “server”, just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a “user”, don’t have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.


  • Storage is cheap until it isn’t.

    On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).

    On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/dd)? Yeah… I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.


  • If dependencies are articulated (and maintained…) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So appfoo depends in libbar@2:2.9 and so forth. Of course, the reality is that libbar is poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug in libbar@2.1.3.4.5 anyway.

    Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application’s dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds… at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.

    And yeah… I run way too many appimages too.